While lot's of folks mastered web site marketing during the previous 15 years, and did really well at lifting the exposure of any business because of it, if you don't know what the LATEST things are that can get you indexed higher on the search engine pages now a days you might end up missing the mark, or even getting your web site banned from appearing at all. 10 years ago, I'd say find a good 15 year old geek and let 'it rip!

5 years ago I'd have said something like buy a good book or a specific software to lend a hand and take it on yourself, you might do well. You now need to know what search engine spiders look for, how they "grade" what they find, and what to avoid to keep from getting "sandboxed" at Google or even completely banned from ALL search engines using things that used to be successful. You have to understand what NEEDS to be read first by a spider, and why that could be totally different from the "reading" your website visitors will be doing, but how to make sure that the visitor's reading viewpoint is put together as that is also very important to being successful. You MUST have as many "offsite" issues perfectly put together as any of the many onsite issues that must be balanced to the positive direction. In short, find somebody who has a CURRENT history of SEO (
Search
Engine
Optimazation) success ...... and pay whatever they demand. It ALL balances out in how much a successful business can risk to keep from doing the wrong thing.
[email protected] edit, dang it, missed an "n" there .......
This post edited by Alan_Cole 06/03/2008